Cincinnati Is Cool, Part 2: The Streetcar Edition

Cincinnati is a town that always gets what it deserves, but not always in a good way. This month, Cincy got what it deserved the good way. After years of controversy and a last-minute attack by an anti-transit mayor, no further obstacles stand in the way of completing the city’s streetcar transit project.

Some background is in order. Five and a half years ago I blogged that Cincinnati is Cool. The epic-length post chronicled my surprise during my first visit at how fun, interesting, urbane, and full of promise the place is in real life, and was widely read for months in the Queen City, itself.

In that post I noted Cincinnati’s growing trend of liberal urbanism and hipness. But I also noted a disturbing counterpoint–an unrepentant insularity fed by decades as a conservative company town (Fifth Third Bank, Kroger, Macy’s, Proctor & Gamble) that led residents immune to the city’s hipness to feel at home openly expressing casual racism, classism, and anti-transit attitudes in public. In my 2008 post, I wondered which would win in the end: the forces trying to drag Cincinnati into 21st century America, or the forces trying to keep the city stuck in the 1950s.

Cincinnati’s history might suggest the latter would win. After all, the city is home to the planet’s largest unfinished subway system, partially built in the 1920s and then bricked over and abandoned before ever carrying a single rider. When the city began its streetcar project in the late 2000s as a tool to improve transit connectivity and attract more residents and businesses to its up-and-coming downtown core, many people expected the effort to meet a similar end.

Then a funny thing happened. The local hipsters found that a lot of other locals wanted light rail, too, including leaders in the city’s supposedly stuffy business and foundation communities, and, eventually, outgoing African-American mayor Mark Mallory (I assure you his race is important) and a majority of City Council members. The city won $45 million in competitive funding from the Federal Transit Administration, and construction began.

And then a less funny thing happened. Conservative, anti-transit interests organized themselves politically and tried to kill the streetcar. They supported a new–and white (also important)–candidate when Mallory’s term ended due to term limits and began a campaign to discredit the public funding of transportation projects. Incoming Tea Party mayor John Cranley won with a central campaign promise: stopping the streetcar project.

Here’s the deal. “Anti-transit” in Cincinnati has nothing to do with transit or with the use of public funds for transit. The city has a sizeable and successful public bus system, complemented by bus systems on the Kentucky side of the Ohio River. “Anti-transit”–and its synonym, “anti-streetcar”–are nothing more than the linguistic version of white hoods worn over the heads of Queen City racists. They’re fearful that the remnants of the African-American community in the city’s downtown Over-the-Rhine neighborhood who have not yet been pushed out by gentrification will instead be carried to white corners of the city by a streetcar project whose main route goes right through OTR.

Which is a good thing. Everyone has a right to ride public transportation. And it isn’t as if the city’s existing bus system doesn’t knit OTR together with the rest of the city already. No, today’s anti-transit in Cincinnati simply means, “Let’s keep the blacks in their place.” In OTR. Which is part of an amazingly thriving and popular regional urban core. Except we don’t know that because we’ve refused to set foot there for years.

Or travel back in time with me to the dinner I shared in downtown Cincinnati with three white acquaintances, one of whom felt perfectly free to opine in full voice that “Only the ‘element’ will ride the streetcar,” as if even merely saying the words “African-American” was beneath him. And as if I, as a white person within earshot, would by definition find his choice of words acceptable.

Immediately after being sworn in on December 1st, Cranley engineered a City Council vote on pausing the streetcar project, pending a study to look at how expensive it would be to cancel the project. Cranley promised that the city could use any unspent FTA monies on other transportation projects. If the project continued, Cranley also demanded that operating expenses be paid for privately and not with public funds.

Of course, for the city to have gotten FTA funding, other cities had to go without. And to begin drawing down that funding, the city had already entered into a legal contract with the federal government. And public monies operate the existing bus system, and build and maintain the existing roadway system. And the major local foundations who would be instrumental in securing private operating monies were already threatening to pull money out of civic projects in protest over Cranley’s streetcar opposition.

But, you know, details.

The City Council study found that it would cost Cincinnati more to end the streetcar project than to complete it. But that and the foregoing details weren’t nearly as important as a letter Cranley received from the Federal Transit Administration, the details of which were widely reported in local media. The gist of the letter: complete the project or immediately pay us back $45 million.

The FTA reminded the city that the grant monies were a privilege received for a single purpose, and that the city was legally bound to proceed with the project. More importantly, the FTA said that if Cincinnati refused to repay the funds, federal funds destined for Cincinnati for other purposes would be frozen to make the debt whole. And it the most dramatic move of all, the FTA gave Cincinnati exactly one week to change its mind.

Cranley responded that the city would not be ordered around by the FTA. Then on December 19, the FTA letter’s deadline day, a veto-proof City Council majority voted to continue and finish the streetcar project. Local foundation leaders promised to help find $900,000 in non-public monies every year for 10 years to get a swing vote needed to make the Council vote immune to Cranley’s veto.

But unpacking that makes things even more interesting. Besides the fact that Cranley has probably broken the Queen City’s speed record for becoming an abject mayoral failure, local foundation leaders don’t actually have to disburse any monies until the streetcar starts operating in 2016, once the streetcar construction is completed. A lot can happen in three years–including changed financial priorities on the part of foundation and civic leaders. Meaning it’s possible that annual $900,000 funding deal was nothing more than a convenient way to get Cranley out of the way.

If this were a Chicago story, I’d bet money on it.

The route that was the source of all the controversy was only the starter segment of a planned network of streetcars that, much like has happened so successfully in Los Angeles, would follow the city’s original trolley corridors and work in tandem with the existing bus system to give the Queen City a modern, more useful transit system.

Thanks for this post. I hope Cincinnati can hold it together and complete this project. For too long, the attitudes you describe so well have kept me, and I have to presume other Midwestern natives, from ever considering living in Cincinnati. When it’s been time to consider places to live in the Midwest in the past dozen years, I never allowed Cincinnati to get onto the list because I didn’t want to live someplace so insular. People nationally used to knock Cleveland, whose issues were far more benign and easier to fix, IMHO. Good luck cracking into the 21st century, Cleveland! Many cultural institutions (not to mention Jungle Jim’s!) need you to continue to grow and move forward.

When it was time to look at residencies, and then at jobs, my approach was to take out a map of the US and say to Hal, we can live here, here, here and here, and not there, there, there and there. And then within those areas, I suggested the type of neighborhoods we could or could not live in. It’s too bad: Cincinnati is less than an hour from my hometown and both architecturally and geographically interesting, but its state of civic affairs is really messy. As you mentioned.

You’ll be amused, I guess, to note that LA was on the bubble of places we could have lived. We were more partial to San Diego, at least for a short stint.

Stumbling across this late. I’m an ex Cincinnatian who lives in Chicago and still follow politics down in Cincy in part because I’m interested in the recent shocking shift towards urbanism. (I kind of dug around Cincy links because I was discussing police reform with some fellow Chicagoans and how Cincinnati actually achieved it in spite of having far worse racial issues).

Anyways there is one thing I think is off in this article, Cranley had the racists as part of his coalition but it wasn’t his entire strategy for winning, he also managed to convince a lot of the African American community that he was fighting in their best interest by stiring up resentment towards the urban core “hipster-yuppies” who were mostly white and stoked the fire that the AA community would be displaced if things would continue on the current trajectory in spite of the facts being the Over-The-Rhine was quite literally 90% abandoned by the time the neighborhood finally began to turn around circa 2006 (full disclosure this is when I moved away).

He wouldn’t have been able to win the election on racism alone, and a lot of the blame falls on Qualls for not winning over the African American community which would have been easy to win over by simply showing that Cranley quite literally was a catalyst for the riots (if you have the time to watch watch 10 mins of this where a young Cranley is trying to address a police shooting when he lead a council subcommittee on public saftey – spoiler: he fails miserably and agitated an already angry crowd to the point where they eventually would grow violent): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4Zz9zVvcqg&list=PLIlmcDu2xE0UWp1MhyB7_fO6gE18MrN66

Race did play a role here there is no doubt, but Cranley still needed the African American community to win. He built an unlikely coalition by using triangulation on one side winning conservatives by opposing the streetcar and on the other end talking about economic inclusion programs and the role he had in repealing some shockingly regressive anti homosexual laws that were on the book until the early 00s. The people who were squeezed out were urbanists and those were the only folks who voted for Qualls.

MICHAEL THADDEUS DOYLE

I'm an NYC-native, Puerto Rican, Venezuelan, Chilean, French, Jewish convert, Disney World fan with an unexpected last name, living in Chicago. I believe in social justice, big cities, and public transit. I did urban planning in New York. I do communications strategy in Chicago. I've written this blog since 2005. I’ve been with my partner since 2010. And in 2015, I reunited with my family after 20 years apart. Believe in the world you want to live in.